Friday, December 13, 2019

Well it’s back to the battle today

“It is not enough for the teacher to
love the child. She must first love and understand the universe.
She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.” —Dr. Maria
Montessori

we try out some Montessori

I’ve been reading a lot about Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy, ca. 1900) and Montessori-based education.
I’ve written about it here before. Although it can feel
overwhelming, this sense that an entire child’s future rests on my
ability to do parenting “right.” I read an article recently that
questioned that thinking, that said that we should be thinking of
educating children more as being a gardener, rather than being a
carpenter. Basically: not worrying about it so much. Not thinking
of parenting as a verb, as something that you do, but as a
relationship. We shepherd our children, we cultivate the ground they
grow in, but we’re not actually trying to shape them, as we would a
board, into a specific design.

Yet: my struggle is that I feel like
there are many things being done wrong by parents today. There’s
this sense in the article that most parents do things more or less
right, and that most children end up more or less okay. This
assertion I question. I, myself, have struggled for a long time with
something I hesitate to call mental illness, because it feels more
common than that. It feels literally ubiquitous, in the sense that
this cosmic unease—or angst, or a kind of low-level anxiety—is
everywhere. Everyone has it. I’ve written about my struggles with
depression, and I’ve written about my struggles with disordered
eating.

It is, of course, that eternal question
of nature versus nurture. When things go wrong with our children we
want to blame nature, but when things go well, we think we’re doing
a great job.

And I feel like many things are going
wrong with children these days, and not just children, because
children grow up to be adults, and adults and children together make
society. There is much I see wrong with our society right now, much
I believe needs to change. Maybe if we focused a little bit more on our
children, on the ways in which their needs are and are not being met
(or maybe I say so because I happen to have a preschooler) we might
see some changes at a larger societal level.

I just hunted online for my possibly
apocryphal article (which, I believe, really did make the case that
the kids were going to turn out okay), and it turns out that the
research is actually from a book by Alison Gopnik titled The Gardener and the Carpenter. Maybe I heard about it
on my new favorite (that’s a stretch—I have so many favorite
podcasts right—but I wish to God they’d do an episode about Carl
Jung) podcast, “Hidden Brain.”

It turns out that Alison Gopnik makes
exactly the point I’m trying to make, much better than I could,
about the problems with the carpentry method, and the gardening
method that she supports is akin to Montessori.

Referring to the carpentry model, she
says: “the main harm is that it makes the process -- the life of
being a parent -- anxious and difficult and tense and unhappy in all
sorts of ways that are unnecessary. And I think it makes it that way
for parents, and it makes it that way for children… the carpentry
story is one where you're so concerned that the child come out that
you're not giving the child the freedom to take risks and explore and
be autonomous.”

Even though children of carpenters can
be considered more successful: “in some ways, they're doing much
better. They're achieving more, they're less likely to take risks,
they are less likely to get pregnant or to use drugs. But that goes
with a kind of anxiety -- high levels of anxiety, high levels of fear
…that is what you would predict from the carpentry story.”

So, Montessori. Although whenever I
mention the word, especially to another mother, I find my listener’s
eyes immediately shut down: already they’re hearing, “You’re
doing it wrong. Do it this way instead.”

Which, in short, is what I am saying.
But I’m not saying: worry more about how you’re parenting. I’m
saying: trust your children to follow their own path. Prepare their
environment, make it safe, and then get out of their way. Don’t
worry about whether or not they’re doing the right thing, but trust
that what they’re doing meets their current developmental need,
whatever that is.

I find it so difficult to put this
essential Montessori principle into words. It is, as Dr. Montessori
wrote herself, the “secret of childhood,” but the more I learn
about it the more I see these principles borne out by research again,
again, and again, not just for children, and not in work that uses
Montessori terminology. It seems to be not just the secret of
childhood, but the secret to happiness, to contentment, to joy.

#

Take, for instance, the idea of focus.
That particular intense concentration that children use in order to
grow, to explore, to learn to do the things that they need to do in
order to be complete human beings. The focus that a baby has when
she is learning to crawl, or walk. It is one of the things that
initially drew me to the practice, all the blogs with moms showing
pictures of their children with what I now call Montessori face: a
look of intense focus. Of inner drive and determination.

"We cannot know the consequences of
suppressing a child’s spontaneity when he is just beginning to be
active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is
revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender
age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious
veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just
beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a
child to open up himself to life.” --Dr. Maria Montessori

I’ve begun to think of those moments
when my daughter is in deep focus as sacred. To interrupt her, to
ask her if she needs to drink some water, or to teach her how to construct
a tower, or to say we’re leaving for the library— any of these
things interrupt the neural pathways that she is building, the
pathways that she will use for the rest of her life when she is
deeply immersed in something invaluable to her.

In short, it
is flow. I take for granted that you’ve read Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow?
Or that, even if you haven’t, you know what I mean? Flow is that
right-brained state an artist enters into when he is painting, or a
writer when she is writing, or a violinist when he is practicing.
Full immersion into a timeless eternal state, where one may as well
not be in one’s body. Again and again, in study after study, in
book after book, I read about flow as being the one essential element to happiness. People are happy in their jobs when they can find
flow. In their lives, when they have a hobby that allows them to
slip into that state. That old saw “do what you love and you’ll
never work a day in your life” is about flow. I keep reading
self-help books, and they constantly refer to the concept of flow,
and how essential it is to recover true contentment. (Designing Your Lifeis the book I read most recently that mentioned the concept.)

We say what we most want for our
children is happiness, but really we deprive our children of the
concentration that brings it, every chance we get. When they’re
born we immediately pack their playrooms with every possible brightly
colored electronic gadget that sings and dances, with rotund jovial
cartoon animals that never occur in life, with screens and noise and
color and sensation—anything to distract them from the horror of
life— that must be what we really believe, right?—and then we
wonder why they’re unable to put their own toys away, why they
can’t sleep, why they’re having tantrums, why they’re so upset.
All they need is a calm, safe place to discover the world and all we
offer them is distraction.

#

Take, for another, the Montessori idea
of self-reliance.

Or self-trust, self-motivation,
self-esteem — whatever you call it. The idea that I can know
myself, deeply, intimately, and believe, at an intuitive level, that I
know what is right for myself. I have come back to this
self-reliance in my own life as I’ve begun intuitive eating,
learning that my own body’s fullness and hunger signals can be
trusted. Again, it is something that reoccurs in my reading so often, especially
on the self-help websites I frequent: the number one predictor of
happiness is intrinsic motivation. (Like here! Link: "Self-Reliance Is the Secret Sauce to Consistent Happiness")

Anyone can be shamed into doing
anything. It’s a method of force, like physical pain. As soon as
no one’s looking, though, we’re going to go back to the thing
that we really wanted. When we become ashamed of ourselves, we lose
our ability to trust our inner intuition. For a child, self-trust
depends on learning that the way I want to play the blocks is a
manifestation of my own imagination, and of no one else’s. It
means teaching children that their desires can be trusted, and
followed, and that they lead where they should go.

It’s one of the things I’ve read
about early-childhood education that has the most data to back it up:
this understanding that saying “good job” actually subverts
children’s sense of self, because it takes away their ability to
rely on their own intuition and motivation. Link: "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," by Po Bronson

It’s so counter-intuitive, right?
Because we’re saying that what the child is doing is good!
We’re supporting him! We’re telling her she SHOULD trust
herself! Aye, there’s the rub: US adults, from the
outside, telling children what to do, what’s good, what’s bad,
instead of allowing them to discover the world for themselves.

The reason we don’t say good job is
not because we don’t think our children are doing a good job. It’s
because we don’t want them to be reliant on other people to think
that they’re doing a good job. We want that sense of satisfaction
to come from inside, rather than from outside.

"Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into
question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need
to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves.
Praise, however, is a different story entirely." --Alfie Kohn

I continue to struggle with
praise as an adult, as a writer. All I want as a writer is external validation. In the
form of publication, or an agent or an editor telling me that my
words are worthy of reproduction. In the form of money. In the form
of an audience, of you, reading these words. It’s not enough for
me simply to write them, to produce them for the joy they give me,
the sense I have of order coalescing as I organize my sentences. I
want you, reader, to tell me “good job.” Preferably in the
comments.

So. Is it any surprise that I want
something different for my daughter? Something different than what
was given to us by our parents, and what I’ve consistently watched
other people give their children: shame, and guilt, and constant
reliance on external validation.

A brief story: we toured a Montessori
school (Bridgeview Montessori) and the director said that she’d
sent her daughter to Montessori preschool, but then to kindergarten
at a traditional school. When she and her husband figured out that
it wasn’t working for their daughter, they brought her back into
Montessori school. Even in that one brief year, she had
unlearned this ability to trust her own intuition, her reliance on
intrinsic motivation, her own inner sense of self. The girl would
bring her drawings up to the teacher and say: isn’t this good? Is
this what you wanted? Is this how it should be colored?

The Montessori-trained teacher would
have to answer: what do YOU think? Is it good for you? Is that how
you wanted your drawing to come out? Can you talk to me about it?

That’s after one year. Only one year
of traditional school.

“...it's particularly
ironic because school was actually designed as part of trying to get
people trained for an industrial world. In a sense, school was
designed to make robots, in that it gave people skills that now
robots are capable of doing. And in a post-industrial world, exactly
the skills that we need -- innovation, creativity, risk-taking -- are
exactly the ones that we're not encouraging.” --Alison Gopnik

When I say I want this self-trust for myself, I
mean that I’m thinking of starting remedial Montessori workshops
for adults. Because I have 41 years of that kind of programming to
counteract. It’s why yoga has been my heart-song for the last
however many years. In yoga, the teacher says: allow your body to
be what it is today. Listen to your body, the same way in Montessori
we say: follow the child. In yoga, the lights are off and I’m on
my mat myself, no one to impress, no teacher to show off for. Even
though 99 percent of the time, I’m thinking: did that impress her?
Or: oh no, I’m not doing it right.

The other crazy thing about Montessori
is how it actually works. Every principle that I’ve taken
seriously and implemented consistently has had unforeseen benefits
and astonishing success. It works.

The irony is that articles about teenagers all essentially say the same things. Have good boundaries
and agreed-upon limits with your children. (Montessori: freedom
within limits.) Teach them how to do things themselves rather than
doing them for them. Give them autonomy and responsibility rather
than helicoptering all over the place. It seems like so much of what
we’ve done with the millennial generation, all the evils that are
blamed on them, is exactly the opposite: our fault. The boomers,
the Karens. We’ve given them no freedom--not to go outdoors, or to
get jobs, or to hang out with their friends--and instead have given
them limitless addictive technology that may literally be killing
their brains. ("God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” says Sean Parker, Facebook's first president.)

"...that parent can take on the most important role of parenting, that of
teaching the child to take care of himself by demonstrating how it is
done." --"When It's Time for Them To Get a Life," by Jim Fay

"An emerging adult who takes the time to deeply reflect and raise their
own self-awareness about their innermost desires can be guided by them
if they have at least some clues from listening to who they are and what
they value.” --"How To Help My Young Adult Find Their Purpose," by Jennifer Miller

"While some parents may think that they are helping their children to
make better decisions and to fix the consequences of their actions,
research has shown that parental codependency may alienate children from
their own feelings and distance them from self-determination. Ultimately, parents may want to consider setting up boundaries for their children, and also for themselves." --"Failure to Launch," by Mark Banschick

I become more and more frustrated
because not everyone shares this view. The first two essential parts
of Montessori education are prepared caregivers and a prepared
environment, and I fear I am giving my daughter neither. I do my
best, but I’ve been taught to be a voiceless people-pleaser my
whole life, and despite my attempts to the contrary, I am not always
finding the courage to speak up in favor of autonomy, and joy, and
creative freedom, for her or for myself. Plus, these things are
effing expensive. I applied for financial aid at a local Montessori
school and was told that their financial aid maxes out at 30 percent,
meaning if we were to qualify for the maximum, and send Sagan to
school part-time for three days a week, school would still cost $5000
a year. This, despite Dr. Maria Montessori explicitly designing the
method for poor children.

Then I read the data about how
important Montessori is, and how it’s even more effective when
children come from disadvantaged or impoverished backgrounds. It can erase differences between income levels. “The difference in academic
achievement between lower income Montessori and higher income
conventionally schooled children was smaller at each time point, and
was not (statistically speaking) significantly different at the end
of the study," says the National Institutes of Health. "The Montessori Method is not only superior to all alternatives, but categorically so," says America Magazine, in this article. "The scientific link between executive function and school success
couldn’t be clearer, but the real opportunity lies in taking that
science out of the lab and putting it into practice inside the homes and
classrooms of our youngest learners," says Mind in the Making, a nonprofit founded by Jeff Bezos (himself a Montessori alum).

Still, despite the evidence of these and many other studies, education in this
country is not based on science. Nothing in our country is based on
actual scientific data, least of all the precious minds of our most
vulnerable. As a country, we continue to use outmoded, outdated,
hundreds-of-years-old traditional pedagogy.

Meanwhile, I’m watching the
elementary school in our community be torn down and rebuilt with a
$90 million state grant. Money that would pay for 1400 teachers, or
to retrofit our public school into a Montessori one, as this low-income school in rural South Carolina did. (Link: "Public School Makes the Case for Montessori for All.) It feels like a
purposeful attempt to ignore the reality of what is involved in good
education for all children. Because a well-educated populace would mean that
people have the courage to become active. They wouldn’t be
consumed by anxiety and diseases of despair, cocooned inside their
houses and their devices. Freedom means the courage to take
action: against climate change, against racism, against children’s
concentration camps.

“How can we speak of Democracy or
Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to
undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when
we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life,
not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in
their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue,
whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by
elders who say: 'your will must disappear and mine prevail!'—how
can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use
the rights of freedom?” --Dr. Maria Montessori, Education for a New World